Skyhook: Programmable Storage for Databases

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 - 2:45 pm3:10 pm

Jeff LeFevre, University of California, Santa Cruz, and Noah Watkins, Red Hat

Abstract: 

Ceph is an open source distributed storage system that is object-based and massively scalable. Ceph provides developers with the capability to create data interfaces that can take advantage of local CPU and memory on the storage nodes (Ceph Object Storage Devices). These interfaces are powerful for application developers and can be created in C, C++, and Lua.

Skyhook is an open source storage and database project in the Center for Research in Open Source Software at UC Santa Cruz. Skyhook uses these capabilities in Ceph to create specialized read/write interfaces that leverage IO and CPU within the storage layer toward database processing and management. Specifically, we develop methods to apply predicates locally as well as additional metadata and indexing capabilities using Ceph's internal indexing mechanism built on top of RocksDB.

Skyhook's approach helps to enable scale-out of a single node database system by scaling out the storage layer. Our results show the performance benefits for some queries indeed scale well as the storage layer scales out.

Jeff LeFevre, University of California, Santa Cruz

Jeff LeFevre is an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz where he does data management research and leads the Skyhook project within the Center for Research on Open Source Software (CROSS). He received his PhD from UC Santa Cruz with work on database physical design, and then joined HP Vertica R&D where he worked on connecting Vertica and Spark for 2 years before returning to academia to work on Skyhook. Previous speaking includes multiple conference presentations (SIGMOD) and invited talks on research papers.

Noah Watkins, Red Hat

Noah Watkins is a software engineer at Red Hat. He received his PhD from UC Santa Cruz in 2018 where he focused his research on the programmability of distributed storage systems.

BibTeX
@conference {230002,
author = {Jeff LeFevre and Noah Watkins},
title = {Skyhook: Programmable Storage for Databases},
year = {2019},
address = {Boston, MA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = feb
}

Presentation Video